


Unfriendly Relations

by Zeke Black (istia)



Category: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: M/M, Old West, POV Chris Larabee
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-11
Updated: 2017-04-11
Packaged: 2018-10-17 14:25:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10595868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/istia/pseuds/Zeke%20Black
Summary: Chris and Ezra come to an understanding.





	

"We're not friends," Ezra said in a warning voice as they undressed each other the first time.

Chris stared at him quizzically. "Who the fuck said anything about friends?"

Ezra beamed relief, exhilaration, and want as heated as his hand thrusting inside Chris's unbuttoned longjohns.

Best sex Chris'd had in years. Ezra's appreciative, if sleepy, murmurs as Chris slipped out of his bed and into his clothes at daybreak made Chris reckon it'd been fine for him, too.

Ezra repeated his _not friends_ like a bitching ritual at some point before, during, or after each of their nighttime encounters. Chris shrugged or grimaced or muttered, "Uh-huh," in return, till he stopped bothering answering the warning--or declaration of intent or whatever it was--at all.

In daylight, in public, they ignored each other except when on the job, and drank or played cards only in the company of other people.

"Nobody fucking thinks we're friends," he said, impatient, as Ezra paused at a bitching annoying time near the end of their first year.

"Because we're not." Ezra's insistent stare froze them till Chris nodded, releasing the burning lava trail of Ezra's tongue down his breastbone.

"We ain't never gonna be friends," he said preemptively as Ezra rolled him onto his back in the large bed Chris'd fashioned for the side room he'd tacked onto his shack--with its own damned little pot-bellied stove in the corner, Ezra and cold being like a cat and water--during their second winter.

Ezra grinned down at him, eyes brimming with delight and wicked intent: And the relief that always lurked in him at Chris's affirmations. It bothered him a mite, that relief.

"Why's it so goddamned important we ain't friends?" He pitched his voice low, though it was a rare time when they were sitting alone together, out on a deserted strip of boardwalk in the quiet of suppertime. He and Buck had been playing checkers while Ezra read in a pool of sunshine next to them, till Miss Lucille's blue parasol and matching eyes fluttering in Buck's direction distracted him and he bolted off after her.

Ezra's head jerked up and he looked first startled, then alarmed as he glanced around and saw they were alone, sitting peaceably in the sun like random folks do any old time. Ezra stood, snapping the book shut without marking his place, and met Chris's straight gaze up at him for a long, hard moment, Ezra's own face gone blank. Then Ezra turned on his heel and walked into the saloon, his boots rapping a harsh staccato rhythm against the boards.

The batwing doors swung crazily in his wake before slowly creaking to a stop.

In the week-long drought of empty nights that followed, Chris lay in his bed in the boarding house, watching night by night as the moon framed in his window waned progressively to a crescent. Then Ezra was back, opening the locked door with ease in the midnight hush, shedding his clothes in a last thin sliver of moonbeam that made his naked flesh gleam, before sliding into the space Chris made for him on the narrow bed.

Ezra's hands were warm on his chest, his shoulder, but not hot or demanding or enticing. They simply rested on him rather than danced and invited.

Chris waited, nostrils flaring at the stronger than usual scents of whiskey and tobacco Ezra's hair carried.

When Ezra finally broke the silence, his voice was low and rough, a jagged growl of exhaustion undercutting its usual liquid smoothness. "Friends are a weakness. A vulnerability that opponents can exploit at their will. Friends, family: if they suspect you care about someone, anybody at all to some degree or other, they have your Achilles' heel. A weapon they can turn on you to manipulate you."

Ezra stopped on a long, deep breath, fanning warmth against Chris's cheek as he exhaled.

Chris held back his own sigh and kept his voice even. "Maude's teaching."

He could just see Ezra's nod on the pillow beside him in the dim light, his hair like a shadow against the ticking.

"We used to play a game when I was young where we'd go to a new place, somewhere nobody knew us, and pretend we didn't know each other. 'If marks knew I had a child,' she explained, 'they could use my affection for you against me. Threaten to hurt you, or worse perhaps--seize you as a hostage, for instance--to prevail upon me to do what they demand. Or to punish me if I outplay them at the card table or deceive them through their own arrant foolishness.'" His voice acquired her tart lilt. "'Men, I'm sorry to say, can be disgracefully sore losers. Especially the fools.'"

Ezra laughed, but bit it off short. "I learned the truth of that soon enough." A hint of his usual arrogance crept into his tired voice: "Naturally, as a quick learner, I soon excelled at the game. An integral part of various cons we worked together over the years: That she didn't know me, or care, and I didn't know her. If we fell afoul of a mark, they had nobody to target in our stead because, as far as they knew, nobody within reach mattered enough to us to be useful to them."

In the following silence, the cloud-smudged moon glided from view in the window. Chris ran his hand over Ezra's back, feeling the tension enclosing him like a fortress wall.

"We ain't running no bitching cons--"

"It's the only sure safety." Ezra voice was sharp as honed steel. He paused, sighing out a long breath, but his voice remained clipped. "I best men at cards a good deal, Chris. As you well know. Any one of them might seek satisfaction for his anger and humiliation in shooting a stranger in the back if he had some reason to think that injury might rebound on me."

Chris bit back the instinctive need to point out he could look after his own damned self. The rational part of Ezra knew that, but this fear wasn't the rational part of Ezra speaking.

Not anything _rational_ at all.... A grin tugged at the corners of his mouth.

"Yeah, all right." He kept the smile out of his voice and soothed Ezra again with his hands as he'd gentle his horse in a nervous state. "I got it. We ain't friends. You don't care a bitching jot about me, and you're just an irritating blowhard who won't never the hell shut up that I tolerate when I have to because you're useful with a gun."

Ezra's barriers fell like a breached dam and he was a sudden familiar weight of pliant warmth draped over Chris, already inching himself as always into more than his fair fucking share of the bed.

"You're nothing to me and I ain't nothing to you, and that's never gonna change." Chris whispered the promise into the still darkness as Ezra's face burrowed into the gap between his shoulder and neck.

"Exactly." Ezra breathed the word against his skin like a bargain being sealed.

That night in the spring of their third year was the first time they lay together the whole night through and just slept, limbs tangled, naked flesh against flesh.


End file.
